Ihiyotl
Breath-essence / liver-stored shadow-soul
Ihiyotl — from ihiyo, 'breath': the breath-essence, housed in the liver, and the carrier of the strong passions — anger, lust, envy, courage. Ihiyotl is the most leakable of the three forces: it escapes the body as fetid breath when one is angry or lustful, it can be sent out deliberately by sorcerers to harm a target (mal-aire, 'bad air', survives in modern Mesoamerican folk illness as direct continuation of pre-conquest ihiyotl-affliction), and it can be received by an unwary person to their injury. López Austin's reconstruction places ihiyotl in the liver on the basis of indirect textual evidence — the liver as the seat of strong appetites, anger, and the source of bad-air illnesses tied to liver-region pathology. We render the rendered point at the anatomical-right liver region (x = 0.42, y = 0.36 on the front silhouette).
Point 3 of 3 in Aztec Three Animating Forces — Tonalli / Teyolia / Ihiyotl
Cross-tradition overlaps
- Ihiyotl ↔ Ihiyotl (distance 0.005)
Sources
Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book X ch. 28 (primary_canonical)
“His ihiyotl emerges, his ihiyotl spreads abroad — it is said of one whose anger or whose envy harms others.”
López Austin, The Human Body and Ideology, vol. 1 ch. 6 (secondary)